Oracle Blog

The Test Drive: Chhandomay on Sun Product Reviews

Tuesday Jun 24, 2008

BBC World
News prepared
a list of best cloud computing applications available
today, and it featured Sun's Network.com and Blender 3D. The article
noted how Sun's data centers are available for hire by the hour to
power on-demand cloud services. The author mentioned that Network.com
is used mainly for processing scientific data but the servers can also
be used for rendering animations via the open source Blender
software.

Check out this BBC
video clip featuring Sun's cloud computing efforts
as well as snippets from the "Big
Buck Bunny" movie rendered on
Network.com.

Sunday Jun 01, 2008

Big Buck Bunny is a
comedy about a well-tempered rabbit "Big Buck," who
finds his day spoiled by the rude actions of the forest bullies, three
rodents. In the typical 1950s cartoon tradition, Big Buck then prepares
for the rodents in a comical revenge.

What is great about the movie is that it is "open." What is an "open
movie?" Well, "open movie" promotes open content creation in a
community setting.

For "Big Buck Bunny," it is not only developed by an animator community using open source
software Blender but also
distributed under an open license that gives
artists free access to the entire studio database of assets and files
used to make the movie.

"The primary intent of the movie was
to stimulate the development of
open source 3D software, but the quality of Big Buck Bunny on an
artistic level as well as on technical ingenuity is what you
would expect from large animation studios," said Ton Roosendaal,
producer and Blender Institute director.

The Blender team didn't have support of a big studio, yet they
succeeded
with the community support, an open source rendering software and an
on-demand computing platform.

And the last part is where we came in. Blender team needed over fifty
thousand CPU-hours of compute time, and our Network.com grid
services provided them a very powerful platform where they could
use
hundreds of CPUs simultaneously to significantly speed up the movie
rendering process without needing to own the compute infrastructure.

For all the geeks out there, here
is how it happened -- technically
speaking -- over the Network.com grid platform.

Shining example of... the power of community (and lowering barriers to
entry for producing a computer-animated movie), if you ask me.

Tuesday Feb 19, 2008

Last week,
we announced
addition of 14 new applications in the Network.com Catalog, a
collection of online grid-enabled applications that are available from
Network.com's Sun
Grid compute utility service on a pay-per-use basis. In addition,
we announced a new partner program, "Sun Network.com Connection,"
for ISV to create and expand on-demand service offerings and also
expanded Network.com's international availability.

With overviews of the Network.com history since it was first announced,
IT Jungle commented,
"... utility computing is still
something that the company believes in as a long-term prospect for the
IT industry." HPCWire highlighted the ISV
support, and BetaNews liked
Network.com's support of open source technology with applications like
Blender, Zeus and GAP.

My favorite one came from InsideHPC, who wrote
that Sun "sent a Valentine to
potential Network.com customers" with the expanded catalog.

2. Will
Leopard Use Sun's ZFS File System?
- Meandering Passage, 6/6
Earl discusses whether or not
Apple will use Sun's ZFS file system, which he calls "a high capacity
modern file system that is built on top of virtual storage pools."

3. Solaris
Zones And Routing Behaviour -
/dev/random, 5/31
Xavier comments on how zones is
"one of the greatest features of Solaris 10 introduced," and
goes on to discuss an issue with configuring a load-balancer in
triangulation
mode.

4. My
First Bug In OpenSolaris - My.Tech.Page,
5/31
Durga mentions a recent bug found
in OpenSolaris and comments on the Sun Security Coordination Team's
response
that the bug had been found internally.

5. Sun
Studio
12 Released - Cypro's Telephony,
6/4
Commenting on the recent release of
Sun Studio 12, Cypro says, "Finally we have a great IDE with
all the required tools for Solaris and Linux than can compete with
every
other IDE hat is there."

6. NetBeans
6.0 Preview: I Tried It... - Semantic
Metadata, 5/31
Mathias writes his impression
of the latest NetBeans 6.0 preview and highlights how the interface is
friendly and the editor is fast and easy to use.

8. Managing
Business Need With The Datacenter Power Issues
- Blade Watch, 6/5
200
Hours Free Grid @ Network.com - Blade Watch, 6/5What's
ILO In Sun Server - BladeWatch,
5/31
Martin comments on a recent Sun
customer's question about the Sun equivalent to HP ILOs and links to
information
on several Sun Web sites. He/she also highlights Sun grid site, where
you
can pay $1 per cpu hour to use the Sun grid, and encourages blog
readers
to check out the site. In another post, this blogger discusses how low
energy servers, like Sun's T1000 and T2000 servers, can provide lower
costs
for businesses.

Thursday Apr 26, 2007

In the April issue
of
Sys Admin magazine, we received
three positive pieces of coverage including a detailed review of the
Sun
Grid Engine, a technical review of Solaris 10 and a how-to article that
explains
how to set up process accounting on Solaris 10.

In
a positive detailed review of Sun Grid Engine,
Rayson Ho of Sys Admin
Magazine provides a brief history of the Sun Grid Engine and discusses
how,
with each release, the open source community contributes new features.
Rayson describes the architecture of Grid engine clusters, system
requirements and installation steps, and provides an overview basic
Grid
commands. He concludes by
highlighting the growing number of useful features
with each release of
Grid Engine and says, "It is
impossible to document all the useful
features in Grid Engine in one article."

In a very technical and
positive in-depth review of Solaris
10 Resource
Management, the Sun product is positioned as a "significant enhancement
of the facilities in previous versions." The reviewer, Scott
Cromar,
takes a step-by-step look at Solaris 10's task and process-level
management
capabilities, omitting a focus on Zones to discuss
the function in a
different
article.

In third and final review,
Marco Marongiu describes how to set up process
accounting on Solaris 10, based on Aileen Frisch's Essential System
Administrationbook, the Sun System Administration Guide as
well
as his own personal experience. Marco states process accounting as
the
capability of the operating system to track system activities by
recording
statistics. The article goes on to describe various commands and
scripts
to set up process accounting, and how the system administrators can
leverage them.

2. Sun's
Grid Online - Blade Watch, 3/29
Martin considers Sun's "click
and run" support for its Network.com service a positive move by Sun
to remove initial start up costs and other developer challenges with
Grid.

3. Being
A Sun Studio Fan... - Cypro's
Telephony, 4/1
A long time user of Sun products, Cypro praises the quality of tools
and service coming from the Sun
Studio
team.